Announcing VMware Cloud Foundation 3.5 General Availability

At VMworld EMEA 2018 VMware announced the upcoming VMWare Cloud Foundation 3.5 release. Today, it’s my pleasure to announce that this latest release on our best in class private cloud solution has reached general availability. We’ve introduced a number of new features in this new release, and I’d like to take this opportunity to provide a short overview of some of these new features.

As with every release of VMware Cloud Foundation, everything starts with an updated Software Bill of Materials (BOM). In this new release, we have integrated some of the latest releases of VMware products into Cloud Foundation, some highlights include: vSphere 6.7 Update 1, NSX-V 6.4.4/NSX-T 2.3, and the vRealize Lifecycle Manager v2.0, which can be leveraged to deploy vRealize Automation 7.5 and vRealize Operations 7.0.

Note the new addition to the VCF 3.5 Software BOM with NSX-T v2.3, the latest Network Virtualization technology from VMware allowing customers to realize multi-cloud architectures and native support for containers. During the creation of a new Workload Domain in SDDC Manager, Cloud Administrators are now able to select the deployment of either NSX-V or NSX-T to support their workloads.

During the launch of VCF 3.0, we “opened the floodgates”, in terms of supported hardware, by announcing support for all VSAN ReadyNodes in the VSAN Hardware Compatibility Guide. With VCF 3.5, we continue to expand on hardware support by introducing deeper integration with Composable Infrastructure. VCF now includes a partner agnostic architecture to support Composable Infrastructure. This capability is accomplished through an integration of SDDC Manager with industry standard Redfish Composability APIs. VMware is proud to announce HPE Synergy as the first supported composability platform with this new capability.

VCF now supports creation of a Workload Domain on NFS 3.0 Storage. Although VSAN is the preferred storage platform for VMware and Cloud Foundation, we recognize that many customers have existing investments in NFS 3.0 storage that they would like to continue to leverage. With NFS support customers can continue utilizing their investments in NFS as they begin their Cloud Foundation journey.

VCF 3.5 also comes with some nice usability improvements. One area in particular is with making it easier to add physical capacity to your Cloud Foundation based private cloud. In previous releases of Cloud Foundation, the “Commissioning” of new hosts was accomplished one host at a time, with an administrator providing the input data for each host manually. The SDDC Manager now has an improved workflow that allows for Bulk Host Commissioning and Decommissioning of hosts. This feature will enable a Cloud Administrator to commission new servers at scale saving valuable time, and reducing the opportunity for human error.

The SDDC Manager user interface now includes a Security category for Password Management and Certificate Replacements. The Improvements to Password Rotation include the ability to automate the rotation of all component passwords, or to update any individual component passwords via the SDDC Manager web interface. Using the Certificate Replacement feature in SDDC Manager, Administrators can now automate certificate creation and replacement of all externally-facing Cloud Foundation components, such as Platform Service Controllers, vCenter, NSX Manager, SDDC Manager, and vRealize Automation/LogInsight/Operations components.